It is so hard to believe our school year is just about over! I want to thank all the wonderful families here at St. Mary's School for making my first year here very enjoyable, and I can't wait to be back next year. The kiddos in this classroom are truly a great bunch, and have been wonderful to work with. I am truly going to miss them!Even though our school year is coming to an end, I feel this time of year is the busiest.

Math-We learned how to add 2 two-digit numbers. Some equations required making a new ten group which we called regrouping. The students learned and practiced using many different strategies to solve these types of equations. During the last couple of weeks we learned about money, and practiced adding different amounts of money together.

Science-We continued to learn about weather. We learned about cirrus, cumulus, and stratus clouds, and what kind of weather they bring. We did many different cloud projects and experiments. We recently had a special visitor, Pete Petoniak, come and talk to the kids about his job. Check out the blog's homepage to see the youtube links.

Social Studies-We are talking about economics. We talked about jobs. The students learned that they have a job right now as a first grader (also jobs at home). We are earning "money" for our job at school, but we can also lose our "money" if we are not doing our job. On the last day of school we will be able to buy things with the money we earned.

Religion-We talked about what a parish is, and what parish we belong to. We learned that parish members do things together like a family. We talked about the seven sacraments.

Reading- We are working on syllables and compound words. At first, when we learned that a compound word is two words put together to make a new word, they were silly about it and could only remember it by calling it a twopound word. So if you hear that now you know where it came from. We also talked about vowel teams and the sounds that they make. When we see these words the rule is usually that the first vowel does the talking, and says its own name.

Writing-We worked on fiction stories. At first, some students struggled with getting ideas, but once they got going I could see their imaginations and crazy ideas come to life. Our class book that we published should be here any day now.